Mirko Bargaric, Tony Abbott, and an empathetic understanding of the idleness of the youff of today ...

With empathy all the go - indeed compulsory, according to Janet Albrechtsen, in leaders, and therefore presumably journalists and commentariat commentators - much has been made of Bob Brown's unempathetic linking of climate change to the Queensland floods.

What then should we make of Tony Abbott's unempathetic linking of the Queensland floods to the urgent need to scrap the NBN?

Here he is, back on January 8 in The Australian under the header 'Scrap NBN to save funds':

"The undoubted substantial costs of responding to the flood disaster in Queensland and now in NSW call further into question the wisdom of spending $50 billion-plus of taxpayers' money on a National Broadband Network which can be perfectly well provided in most instances by competition between private sector businesses," he said.

Perfectly well provided? Except it hasn't of course, even where competition is most likely, in urban areas, because of the way the Howard Government (and let's give the Keating government credit too) mismanaged that elephant in fibre land, Telstra, and its privatisation.

Sydney could of course offer to give up its annual fireworks display ($5 million a go on New Year's eve, and standing by to explode any time two dogs are spotted fornicating) if that would help, and the savings on affray, assault and public drunkenness would also be enormous, but perhaps that doesn't tickle the till enough.

Yep, the $50 billion plus is a pretty hefty price tag, and the only surprise is that the Murdoch Empire - long accustomed to raging against the NBN - didn't pick up Abbott's thought bubble and run with it hard.

Oh sure news.com.au picked up an AAP version of the story on January 18th - under the header Scrap NBN for flood recovery - Tony Abbott, which led off thus:

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has called on the government to scrap its multi-billion dollar National Broadband Network (NBN) to help fund the Queensland flood recovery.

With the damage bill for the recovery effort estimated to run into the billions of dollars, Mr Abbott called for government expenditure to be "reprioritised", starting with the costly NBN.

Taxpayers are investing $27.5 billion in the telecommunications project, which will deliver high speed internet services to households across Australia.

$27.5 billion? You mean we just saved $22.5 billion thanks to a subbie helping out Abbott with his sums?

Hang on, not so fast, because here's Mirko Bargaric in the Daily Terror today, with Abbott sees the light on NBN in our darkest days:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's call to scrap the $36 billion NBN to fund the floods rebuilding program is a moment of irrefutable clarity among the slush and the mud from the floods. Governments must prioritise to provide necessities over luxuries.

Irrefutable clarity? Well Bargaric is a dab hand at sums:

Even without the flood crisis, the Federal Government's plan to roll out cable under every street to give us quicker internet for the cost of $36 billion was always going to down as Australia's greatest public waste.

Thirty six billion amounts to over $2000 for every Australian man, woman and child.

Yes, yes, but you've already saved us $14 billion by helping Tony Abbott with his figuring. Why not just hand that over to every Australian man, woman and child?

It turns out that Bargaric is something of a wowser, a prude, and possibly even an hysteric, as he recycles old saws once delivered about the way motion pictures, comic books, and then television (not to mention rock 'roll on your four band eight transistor radio) was ruining the youth of the day, and inviting them to a life of sybaritic indulgence:

If the government wanted to find out about the effects of encouraging more internet use, it should have jumped on the internet to see what the research says about its impact.

It paints a grim picture, whichever way you google it.

A recent Neilsen study found that Australian users are spending an average of more than two working days (17 hours) on the internet per week. Younger people spent far more time and broadband access also increases usage times.

Yes, that's the way to fix the problem. When asking people to rectify the problem of spending too much time on the intertubes, always demand they spend some time on the intertubes examining the problem, thereby compounding the problem of the wastrel intertubes. Perhaps we could demand that people exploring the problem of time wasting on the intertubes also explore the problem of examining the problem on the intertubes, which of course leads to a new problem, and so on and on to infinity ... and a hearty dose of Zeno's paradoxes ...

Of course mature adults understand the problem only too well, which is younger people. The youff of today, with their incessant desire for speed, and more speed, and not just the drug.

The Government needs to abandon its $36 billion cable roll out to make the internet faster.

If it has a fanatical desire to spend $36 billion on a project relating to the internet, it would be better off spending the money encouraging people to get off the internet and go outside and do things that connect with the absolute real world.

Yes, the real world is no longer just the real world, it's the absolute real world.

Perhaps the youff of today could emulate Percy Grainger, and get in touch with the absolute real world by running naked through the snow, or sleeping naked with their windows open in the middle of winter, or by running between towns to get to gigs, or by just giving themselves a decent birching in approved Grainger style.

As well as playing the piano - always an excellent outdoor activity - it could qualify them for membership of Opus Dei (ah Percy, Percy, gifted and mad as a cut snake and all without the help of the intertubes, as explained on his wiki here).

Still, I'm finding it a little hard to follow Bargaric's logic. After demanding that the youff of today get off their collective bums, and get outside and do things that connect them to the real absolutely totally really awesome world of reality - like kicking around a football or sticking their heads up the bums of men in some kind of scrum - he comes out with this:

Thirty six billion dollars is more than double that needed to rebuild Queensland.

The change should be spent on more hospitals, recreational and sporting facilities, libraries, pools and community halls.

This would produce massive increases to community and individual prosperity.

Libraries, community halls, hospitals? They're all indoor activities, though I'm not too keen on hospitals as a way of getting in touch with the absolutely real world ...

Ah well perhaps Bargaric has never read an electronic book, or watched a movie on his iPad. Those silly futurists, babbling on about the way the intertubes is becoming a giant interconnected library with information about everything.

Hang on, a redeeming thought just struck me through the befuddlement induced by the intertubes. These days you see you can take the intertubes with you, and so it becomes an outdoor activity. Why you can watch actual real ducks cavorting on loon pond while reading about ducks cavorting on loon pond ....

Ah well moving right along, there was a point to the reference about Percy Grainger and a damn good whipping, because Bargaric will be fondly remembered for his splendidly empathetic argument for torture, in A case for torture:

The belief that torture is always wrong is, however, misguided and symptomatic of the alarmist and reflexive responses typically emanating from social commentators. It is this type of absolutist and short-sighted rhetoric that lies at the core of many distorted moral judgements that we as a community continue to make, resulting in an enormous amount of injustice and suffering in our society and far beyond our borders.

Now there's someone well prepared to right memos for George W. Bush, dismissing the Geneva Convention as obsolete and quaint, and using the ticking clock syndrome of the TV show 24 to argue for the efficacy and usefulness of torture.

Which brings us to Joseph Lelyveld's review of George W. Bush's Decision Points for the NYRB, under the header Curveballs, which is happily outside the paywall.

Big surprise: Bush 43 isn’t into remorse. He also isn’t given to brooding or wondering about what might have happened had he chosen other policies or advisers. So he never allows himself to ask what he’d have done had he been gifted with foresight and understood from the start the real costs of his intervention in Iraq: a conflict lasting not months as he was originally assured but the better part of a decade, with more than 4,400 Americans killed in action and 30,000 wounded, many grievously; 100,000 or more Iraqi civilian casualties; several million refugees; and an overall cost to American taxpayers approaching $1 trillion.

Ah yes, empathy. No doubt the same empathy all the cheerleading commentariat commentators feel ...

But hang on, here's a thought, we can scrap the NBN and send the savings to the United States to help pay off their debt - after all a trillion tends to make the odd billion look pretty ordinary - and with a bit of luck the United States will then be able to afford to send the youff of today off on more outdoorsy foreign adventures. Join the military and see the world ... kill and torture (it can be useful you know).

And what does all this have to do with empathy for Queenslanders and the Queensland floods, as opposed to scoring cheap political points and making absurd remarks about the intertubes?

Bugger all.

Isn't it a kind of cheap equivalency, and meaningless to boot, in much the same way as this piece is full of meaningless equivalencies?

Well yes, but if you want some clarification, go ask Bargaric.

You'll find him coming at you with unseemly slowness on the snail-like Australian intertubes ...

Meanwhile, in another part of the digital planet, the anonymous editorialist for The Australian wants to call a spade a spade, a rose a rose a rose, a shovel a blooody shovel, and Let's call a mother a mother, and inter alia, comes up with this line:

Back then, women were encouraged to shelve their emotions, even though they were biological parents.

Yes, a mother is a mother is a biological parent.

Well the excellent news is that Miranda the Devine has finally returned from total bludgerdom to scribble a full rant about motherdom (and why celebrities and gays are wicked in Buying a baby - not a pair of shoes, but alas we have already wasted way too much time on the intertubes - lordy is that a new set of pimples forming on the chin already - and so must head outdoors for some cleansing cathartic exercise ...

Take it away Gertie:

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters,
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Pages ages page ages page ages.

(Below: Man Ray doing Gertrude Stein. Oh intertubes what a dangerous waste of time you are. Must go outdoors and find some stinging nettles with which to lash myself).